Clara Mihaela Ionescu

• PhD Biomedical Engineering
• Professor at Ghent University

This study introduces an enhanced adaptive fractional-order nonsingular terminal sliding mode controller (AFONTSMC) tailored for stabilizing a fully submerged hydrofoil craft (FSHC) under external disturbances, model uncertainties, and actuator saturation. A novel nonlinear disturbance observer modified by fractional-order calculus is proposed for...

Early assessment of respiratory mechanics is crucial for early-stage diagnosing and managing lung diseases, leading to greater patient outcomes. Traditional methods like spirometry are limited in continuous monitoring and patient compliance as they require forced maneuvers with significant patient cooperation, which may not be available in fragile...

This paper proposes and validates an automatic control tuning methodology based on initial frequency response. This approach facilitates the design of robust PID controllers for overdamped systems characterized by S-shaped step responses. In the prior autotuner, which is inherently robust, the critical frequency value is determined via the relay te...

Within biomedical engineering, there has been significant collaboration among clinicians, control engineers, and researchers to tailor treatments to individual patients. Anesthesia is integral to numerous medical procedures, necessitating precise management of hypnosis, analgesia, neuromuscular blockade, and hemodynamic variables. Recent attention...

Despite standards on electrocardiogram (ECG) monitoring in medical diagnostics, signal acquisition is prone to noisy artifacts and relies greatly on the quality of skin contact and signal transducing interference. Electrodes, serving as indispensable conduits in ECG signal acquisition, act as the crucial interface between the human body and recordi...

Little research has been carried out in terms of modeling and control of analgesia. However, emerging new technology and recent prototypes paved the way for several ideas on pain modeling for control. Recently, such an idea has been proposed for measuring the Depth of Analgesia (DoA). In this paper, that solution is further exploited towards obtain...

Tissue hysteresivity is an important marker for determining the onset and progression of respiratory diseases, calculated from forced oscillation lung function test data. This study aims to reduce the number and duration of required measurements by combining multivariate data from various sensing devices. We propose using the Forced Oscillation Tec...

This paper presents a new adaptive fractional-order MRAC controller design for the class of non-integer second-order systems. The update of the control law gains follows a derivative of fractional order equal to the order of the controlled system model. The stability analysis of the control system has been performed based on Lyapunov theorem. We ap...

Personalised pharmacokinetic models imply stepping away from the classical assumption of homogeneous drug mixing in various tissue compartments in the body, with a particular impact on obese patients. In this work, the pharmacokinetic compartmental model structure is revisited to account for non-uniform distribution of uptake/clearance time constan...

In the realm of anesthetic management during surgical procedures, the reliable estimation of mean arterial pressure (MAP) is critical for ensuring patient safety and optimizing drug administration. This paper investigates the determination of the optimal Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) architectures aimed at enhancing the estimation of MAP. Using dat...

Obesity lies at the very baseline of comorbidities challenging surgery outcomes and patient recovery times. This paper introduces a theoretical framework for modelling drug diffusion in fat tissues, addressing a significant gap in conventional pharmacokinetic models for non-lean patients in long-term anesthesia. The research uses the trust region...

This paper outlines the design of a fractional-order proportional–integral–derivative controller for regulating the induction phase of Propofol infusion in lean and obese patients. The obtained controller is implemented within the pharmacokinetic-pharmacodynamic model and the nonlinear Hill function to conduct closed-loop simulations. The latter ar...

In this paper, we present the development and the validation of a novel index of nociception/anti-nociception (N/AN) based on skin impedance measurement in time and frequency domain with our prototype AnspecPro device. The primary objective of the study was to compare the Anspec-PRO device with two other commercial devices (Medasense, Medstorm). Th...

This letter presents an extension to system theory as a novel approach to provide models from clinical data under large uncertainty and poor identifiability conditions. These difficult conditions are often present in medical systems due to ethical, safety and regulatory limitations regarding application of persistent drug-related excitation to huma...

Background: In December 2019 the World Health Organization announced that the widespread severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) infection had become a global pandemic. The most affected organ by the novel virus is the lung, and imaging exploration of the thorax using computer tomography (CT) scanning and X-ray has had an impor...

Multidrug therapy for cancer treatment trends nowadays due to evidence-based success in clinical trials. In particular, minimizing lung tumor growth in cancer-diagnosed patients involves the knowledge of a model to how the drugs interact with the organism and with each other. We recently proposed, calibrated, and partially validated a pharmacodynam...

Objective: The problem of reliable and widely accepted measures of pain is still open. It follows the objective of this work as pain estimation through post-surgical trauma modeling and classification, to increase the needed reliability compared to measurements only. Methods: This article proposes (i) a recursive identification method to obtain...

In this paper, the formation consensus problem for a class of leader–follower networked multi‐agent systems under communication constraints and switching topologies is investigated. A networked predictive control scheme is proposed to achieve stability and output formation consensus with the switching topology, capable of compensating for data loss...

Background: Reliable measurement of perioperative pain is still an ongoing problem. Pain monitors are commercially available, but to date are not commonly used clinically. Anspec-Pro was developed as a new pain monitor device by Ghent University in 2018. The validation study compared this monitor to the commercially available and validated MedStorm...

This paper presents an original theoretical frame-work to model steel material properties in continuous casting line process. Specific properties arising from non-Newtonian dynamics are herein used to indicate the natural convergence of distributed parameter systems to fractional order transfer function models. Data driven identification from a rea...

Symmetry breaking in the anatomical lung is triggered by tumorigenesis and disrupted by delivering single or multiple drugs to stop the progression of the tumor and treat cancer. In this study, a prior model of combined drug therapy is augmented to introduce tissue heterogeneity when the drug is applied in multi-drug therapy of lung cancer. Patient...

Objective: This study aims to analyze the contribution and application of forced oscillation technique (FOT) devices in lung cancer assessment. Two devices and corresponding methods can be feasible to distinguish among various degrees of lung tissue heterogeneity. Methods: The outcome respiratory impedance $Z_{rs}$ (in terms of resistance $R_{rs...

This paper presents the evolution of a master course taught simultaneously at multiple master specialisations. The analysis of the course structure, content, teaching and evaluation modes has been presented over several years, including both pre-pandemic and during Covid 19 pandemic time. The challenges of dealing with a highly heterogeneous studen...

The societal and economic burden of unassessed and unmodeled postoperative pain is high and predicted to rise over the next decade, leading to over-dosing as a result of subjective (NRS-based) over-estimation by the patient. This study identifies how post-surgical trauma alters the parameters of impedance models, to detect and examine acute pain va...

The presence of disturbances in practical control engineering applications is unavoidable. At the same time, they drive the closed-loop system’s response away from the desired behavior. For this reason, the attenuation of disturbance effects is a primary goal of the control loop. Fractional-order controllers have now been researched intensively in...

Fast and strong interacting systems are hard to control from both performance and control effort points of view. Moreover, multiple objective functions or objectives with various identifiers of varying weights can hold unfeasible solutions at times. A novel cost objective function is proposed here to overcome both feasibility set limitations and co...

Individual curves for tumor growth can be expressed as mathematical models. Herein we exploited a pharmacokinetic-pharmacodynamic (PKPD) model to accurately predict the lung growth curves when using data from a clinical study. Our analysis included 19 patients with non-small cell lung cancer treated with specific hypofractionated regimens, defined...

Light regulation systems in industrial or office buildings play an important role in minimizing the use of fossil energy resources, while providing both economic and ergonomic optimal functionality. Although industrial buildings resolve the problem of interaction or disturbance mitigation by providing constant light levels exclusively from artifici...

The scientific community has recently seen a fast-growing number of publications tackling the topic of fractional-order controllers in general, with a focus on the fractional order PID. Several versions of this controller have been proposed, including different tuning methods and implementation possibilities. Quite a few recent papers discuss the p...

Following the paradigm shift in the pharmaceutical industry from batch to continuous production, additional instrumentation and revision of control strategies to optimize material flow throughout the downstream processes are required. Tableting manufacturing is one of the most productive in terms of turnover and investment into new sensor technolog...

The present work tackles the modeling of the motion dynamics of an object submerged in a non-Newtonian environment. The mathematical model is developed starting from already known Newtonian interactions between the submersible and the fluid. The obtained model is therefore altered through optimization techniques to describe non-Newtonian interactio...

Introduction In long-term induced general anesthesia cases such as those uniquely defined by the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic context, the clearance of hypnotic and analgesic drugs from the body follows anomalous diffusion with afferent drug trapping and escape rates in heterogeneous tissues. Evidence exists that drug molecules have a preference to ac...

In this work, we present a synchronous co-simulation of a 6DOF (six degree of freedom) ball and plate platform and its 3D computer model. The co-simulation in the virtual environment is intended to mimic the rendezvous between a cargo vehicle such as the Falcon 9 from SpaceX and the ISS (International Space Station). The visual feedback sensing of...

For complex systems, it is not easy to obtain optimal designs for the hardware architecture and control configurations. Every design aspect influences the final performance, and often the interactions of the different components cannot be clearly determined in advance. In this work, a novel co-design optimization method was applied that allows the...

This work presents the development of a distributed formation control for multiagent systems (MASs) using a fractional-order proportional-integral (FOPI) structure. The fractional control protocol proposed is evaluated on agents modeled with single- and double-integrator dynamics, in which it enhances the convergence speed of the formation and impr...

Introduction As pulmonary dysfunctions are prospective factors for developing cancer, efforts are needed to solve the limitations regarding applications in lung cancer. Fractional order respiratory impedance models can be indicative of lung cancer dynamics and tissue heterogeneity. Objective The purpose of this study is to investigate how the exis...

We are witnessing a notable rise in the translational use of information technology and control systems engineering tools in clinical practice. This paper empowers the computer based drug dosing optimization of general anesthesia management by means of multiple variables for patient state stabilization. The patient simulator platform is designed th...

This paper proposes two modeling approaches to predict lung tumor dynamics as an effect of radiotherapy. Real clinical information of non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) patients undergoing stereotactic body radiation therapy (SBRT) as the primary treatment method has been used for numerical simulations. The classical Gompertz model for tumor volume...

This work aims to study postsurgical trauma modeling to characterize the physiological process in postoperative pain assessment in an observational trial. The skin impedance data is proposed to be fitted by derived-Cole models, i.e., single and double dispersion models and a distributed model with an inductive term related to sweat glands. These mo...

Stroke is a medical condition which can easily affect the quality of life, depending on how extended the stroke is and what regions of the brain are involved. According to the most recent data cited in WHO, Romania is in top three of the countries with increased frequency of stroke and has the second place for having the most deaths and disabilitie...

Cyber-physical systems revolve around context awareness, empowering objective-oriented services, products and operations based on real data. Self-aware and self-control systems are core elements in the Industry 4.0 framework towards self-sustainable adaptive manufacturing and personalized services. This development is witnessed by the context-aware...

The paper aims to revive the interest in bioimpedance analysis for pain studies in communicating and non-communicating (anesthetized) individuals for monitoring purpose. The plea for exploitation of full potential offered by the complex (bio)impedance measurement is emphasized through theoretical and experimental analysis. A non-invasive, low-cost...

A fractional-order model predictive control with extended prediction self-adaptive control (FOMPC-EPSAC) strategy is proposed for the AR.Drone quadrotor system. The objective is to achieve an optimal trajectory tracking control for an AR.Drone quadrotor by using a fractional order integral cost function in the conventional MPC-EPSAC algorithm. In a...

This article addresses the consensus problem in multi-agent systems modeled with double-integrator dynamics under constant disturbances. Therefore, a fractional control protocol to enhance the convergence speed and robustness of the system is proposed. The communication topology of the system is represented by an undirected connected graph. In addi...